Kimberly Decker [who took a photo and posted it on Facebook] says the mother in question lugged portable potties into the restaurant, placed them on chairs and sat her children down on them. At first Decker thought the potties were booster seats but when the mother stripped off her children’s clothes, she realized the twins were going to the bathroom—in the middle of the restaurant in front of other diners.

“She had to undo the jumpsuits, and take them all the way down so they were completely nude, with the jumpsuits down to their ankles just eating their chicken nuggets, sitting on little toddler potties”...

You have to question whether Decker made the right choice in posting the photo online.

Kelly said perhaps the best evidence [that it's really Emily Dickinson] is an ophthalmological report that compared similarities in the eyes and facial features of the women in the photos....

That could shift some perceptions about the Amherst native... For instance, a book in the 1950s was the first to propose Dickinson had a lesbian relationship with [the other woman in the photograph, Kate Scott] Turner....

I think that photo of Emily Dickinson will be proved to be a fake. I think they took a previous picture, (the one at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/emily-dickinson) and used the hair and the forehead to get the width between the eyes right.If you look at the good picture you see that the hair is little off center around the face. It is a little more forward on ED's right. And it is off center the same way in the new picture. And there is a sort of square line around the left eye in the new picture. And there is this sort of haloed blurring in different parts of the picture around the head.Plus this Emily Dickinson has no sense of humor or fun - she would not disturb a feminazi.Summary:This picture was faked by a feminazi who never forgave her mother for toilet training her in a restaurant. Wins the Black licorice on your teeth award for ineptness.

I think that is much better picture of Emily Dickinson than the one that serves as one of the screensavers on the Kindle that was the late 19th-early 20th equivalent of photoshopped. The wavy hair and big ruffly collar, shown on the Kindle picture, do not appear the original photgraph. They also "edited" her poems.

I have grown to appreciate the propriety of the Victorians. Especially when thinking about someone's children using potty seats in the middle of a restaurant.

I really don't get the need people have to assume famous people in history were gay or lesbian based on photos or writings. It was very common at different times in history for women to hold hands and for men to sleep in the same bed. We need to be careful about placing modern meaning on historic events.

Darrell,It's possible to do daguerreotypes right now so if one faked a picture and put it in front of the daguerreotype camera with the silver plate in it - well, there would be a fake picture.Do some reading on famous fakes. There's money in fakes and whole academic careers can be built on a fake one has access to.

The term black licorice makes an unnecessary distinction. There isn't any other kind of licorice. Licorice is a flavor. Not a color. The red stuff is not only repulsive, it's not licorice. Ignorant people should not be allowed licorice.

You can analyze the coatings to see if it were made now or then. Yes, you can make modern ones. Try and make one that presents correctly to an expert with modern test equipment (gas chromatograph, for example). Visual inspection doesn't count and that, I suspect, is what counterfeiters are fooling.

It would have been much funnier if the mom had used the potty seat herself to show the children how it's done. Though it wouldn't be as funny as the video on You Porn with the naked woman and the fishbowl,* now that's an all-time classic!

Art forgers use canvas from the era so if you had daguerreotype plates from the era they would test out. Remember this is potentially a wealth producer plus a lot of art forgers are just trying to fool people to show what they can do. The story doesn't say whether any scientific tests were done on the daguerreotype. Still I must admit that I thought the thing was a fake as soon as I looked at it. 1. Emily Dickinson had a sense of humor all her life; the women in the picture does not 2. I've seen hundreds of old pictures and never seen a pose like that in an early photo or daguerreotype. 3. The pose of the hand is artificial. Then after I looked closely I saw that the outline of the hair in the picture in just like the hair in the early picture. 4. I can see marks around the eyes that are like the marks I have gotten from trying to correct red-eye and over-correcting.